Muhammad Haji Salleh, Ed. an Anthology of Contemporary Malaysian Literature

ASIATIC, VOLUME 4, NUMBER 1, JUNE 2010 Muhammad Haji Salleh, ed. An Anthology of Contemporary Malaysian Literature. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bhasa Dan Pustaka, 2008. 412 pp. ISBN 978-983-62-0043-3. In naming the anthology An Anthology of Contemporary Malaysian Literature and not more appropriately as an anthology of either contemporary Malay literature or Malaysian literature in Malay, Muhammad Haji Salleh is making by it an unambiguous statement of official Malaysian cultural policy. This is that Malay culture is the sole basis of Malaysian culture and, subsumed under it, only writing in Malay or Bahasa Malaysia is considered to be Malaysian national literature. All other writings not in Malay are subordinated under the category “sectional” or dismissively “trivial/aimless” literature. I do not intend, in this review, to question or debate whether the policy encompasses in any way Malaysian cultural realities or that it is just an expression of a hegemonic act. I take here the policy at its face value, but shall, after a preliminary consideration of the scope of Muhammad Haji Salleh’s inclusions for the anthology, survey the poems, short stories, plays, and critical writing included in the anthology and consider whether the survey shows that they bear up to the weight of being Malaysia’s national literature or the only literature written in Malaysia worthy of serious consideration. Despite the editor’s categorisation of .the miscellany of writings collected under the anthology as “contemporary,” none of the pieces included in it is more recent than 1983. In fact many of them, the short stories and the plays in particular, go back to the 1960’s or earlier. An oddity in the citing of sources is in the naming and dating of translations of the original texts as source texts rather than the originals themselves. This makes it difficult for the reader to know the actual dates of composition of the originals. What Muhammad Haji Salleh has made clear is only that he has not included writers who emerged in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Writing in the Introduction in the anthology’s first printing of 1988, he says, “As I write a short survey of this very crowded literary scene, I am deeply conscious of the contribution of the younger writers. Some of them have been writing for over ten years, others for a shorter period…. They belong to another volume I hope to compile before too long” (xlvi). This is indeed a very serious omission: an anthology named as an “anthology of contemporary literature” does not include in it the very writings that would have given credence to the word “contemporary” in the title. Worse, twenty years had elapsed between that first printing in 1988 and the printing in 2008 of the second edition under present consideration. Yet no new writing published since has been added to this 2008 edition. Asiatic, Vol. 4, No. 1, June 2010 102 An Anthology of Contemporary Malaysian Literature What then can the reader infer from this lack of new material to a collection that was already out-of-date at the time of its first printing? Is the truly contemporary writing (i.e. writing of the 1990’s and the first decade of the new century in Bahasa Malaysia) so lacking in interest as not to merit consideration for inclusion in an anthology to showcase contemporary Malaysian national literature? Or is it that so little development has taken place in the national literature since the 1970’s that the writings of those writers who reached maturity in 1950’s and 1960’s can still stand in for all subsequent writing as contemporary writing? If the writings of 1950’s to 1970’s – figures who include Usman Awang, A. Samad Said, Arena Wati, Shahnon Ahmad, Kemala, and Kassim Ahmad – are still considered to be contemporary, then it may be said that our national literature in their concerns has developed little beyond de-tribalisation and its anxieties, ongoing resentment at former British colonisers, parochial debate over whether writers should write for the sake of society or for art, fixation on a pre-colonial native cultural past and preservation of a Malay identity, and earnest advocacy of writing as a religious duty. The only short story in the anthology’s short story section that goes a little beyond these concerns is Abdullah Hussain’s “A Chance Meeting at Cianjur.” As recounted by the narrator who ran by chance into old friends and a Dutch hitch-hiker while travelling in Indonesia, it is a story of chance meetings and surprises, and of time and change in human relationships. Other than this, the other stories tell of people who live out their lives in closed cultures and, as their opposites, others who have left for the city to find either material success there or end up as the marginalised and exploited consigned to abject poverty. These are “mirror” selves of those who stay behind. They are people, who in having left family and community steeped in tradition and religious faith, take to Western ways and have thus become lost in a modern, commercialised, and in their view a fallen world. In a story like Shahnon Ahmad’s “Death and the Family,” for instance, there are, as in a binary opposites, the stock figures of Husin, the Westernized eldest son of the family who found success in the city but has lost touch with the old ways, and Haji Solih, the younger son who stayed behind and grew up into a deeply religious, decent man. A figure similar to Husin is Farid in Khatijah Hashim’s “A Quid of Sirih, a Bowl of Water.” He is a medical student who despises his father for practising traditional healing as a pawang. He finds life in the kampong even on a short visit unbearably boring. He has taken to the city in the expectation of a bright future. But the city as depicted in Adibah Amin’s “Night of Reckoning” and A. Samad Said’s “The Drain” in their different ways is seen to be at the heart of moral decay. The inhabitants are, as in Adibah Amin’s story, lecherous, inconstant men and their insecure wives, while in Samad Said’s, they are people brought down by sloth into lives of squalor. There are others, however, who find themselves settled in but have not become part of the city’s morally fallen. They Asiatic, Vol. 4, No. 1, June 2010 103 Wong Phui Nam form themselves at the city’s margins into closed communities. In a community like this, it is not uncommon to find, as in A. Samad Ismail’s “Ah Khaw Goes to Heaven,” a figure like the narrator’s Mother, whose understanding of Islam is so narrow that her one pre-occupation is to convert non-believers into the religion, even if conversion means only dressing up the potential convert in Malay clothes. In this instance of the narrator’s Mother, however, there is, in her (and in people like her), a simple and basic good-heartedness, for she is trying by his conversion to save Ah Khaw , a Chinese, from the Japanese army’s Sook Ching massacres. It has to be said, also, that Samad Ismail’s intent is satire and a little bit of humour at the foibles of a community living at the margins of 1940’s urban Singapore. The section on poetry is the weakest of the creative writing sections. While it is accepted that much is lost in the translation of poetry, translators are expected minimally, even if they do not make poetry out of their translations, to write decent verse. With few exceptions, the translations as verse add up to lines of dead letters. At heart, the problem lies in the translators (with the exception of Adibah Amin) having no ear for verse rhythm. By way of example of a translator’s tin ear, I quote from A. Samad Said’s “Thank You”: Frequently with the quiet moon in the window rubber trees in the backyard, there’s nothing that I wanted but to squeeze your hands, and embrace your exposed body. And in whispers saying: I thank you rubber tree, though dry of latex. Thank you for making my life, though over-anxious in the day, but ecstatic in the night. (A. Samad Said, “Thank You” 156) Even as prose, the above lines lie limply on the page. As verse, they further fail in not showing any trace of a shaping aural structure. As to what the poem actually says, the reader may be forgiven if he assumes at first reading that “Thank You” is a poem addressed to a human lover. Coming to line 5, however, the reader is jolted by surprise in finding that it is a poem addressed to a rubber tree. As such, I think it descends from the mundane to the ridiculous. In fiction, Samad Said is a realist writer. But in his poems (at least the ones included in the anthology), he is on the writing-for-art side in the ongoing art- for-art versus art-for-society debate among Malay writers. Written as individualist expression, his poems read like poems held over from 19th century European Romanticism without the philosophical underpinning, and replete, as the quotation from “Thank You” shows, with romantic fallacy. Other “romantic” poets who write in the mode of Samad Said, include Baha Zain, Kemala, Dharmawijaya and Zurinah Hassan. Their style is given over to the rhetorical and the extravagant. Thus: Asiatic, Vol. 4, No. 1, June 2010 104 An Anthology of Contemporary Malaysian Literature Your hair, the deep green jungle your breath, the swift mountain gale your love, surf on the shore and your passion, wild tempests (Baha Zain, “Woman” 170) I’m the ocean a lovely maiden asleep on her royal bed a moment’s sketch and dancing winds unite and his with desire for the calm expanse (Kemala, “Ocean” 222) and you are to me my sea because I know your voice you are to me my beach because I understand your language you are to me o sweet whispers of the wind the melancholic melody of the sea background music to my restless drama (Zurinah Hassan, “Waves at My Feet Waves in My Heart” 204) All three quotations above are from poems which appear to have taken off from Usman Awang’s “Beloved.” While the extravagance of the imagery has worked once in Usman’s poem (even here the writing is dangerously close to being over the top) its recurrence in these poems as what is by now stock imagery is mere extravagance and is just that.

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